Re: Delphi and I-Net for Windows 5.x

We are in exactly the same situation, testing and trying to select the right tool. > steinar@balder.no (Steinar O. Cook) writes: > > > > Borland's SQL links provides native connectivity to Informix. The > > product is available as > > a stand alone package for around 180.00 or as part of the 1900.00 > > Delphi client/server edition. > > Have you been using Delphi to connect to Informix?? I have prototyped > > a portion of our > > commercialy available Informix 4gl app in New Era, Access, c++ and am > > currently in the > > porcess of doing it in Delphi. I would like to compare notes. > > We have also been testing Delphi, Access and had a quick look at NewEra. We will also look again at VB 4.0 > > We were not impressed by NewEra v1.0 and are currently awaiting version 2.0. A mild statement about v1.0 I am very afraid we have to wait for ver. 3.x for anything resembling a real high quality tool when it comes to rapid aplication development. From what I know so far about 2.0 the screen painter hasn't significantly changed, and I don't know if it works with Windows 95. Application partitioning is the interesting part to us though, as we need to be able to handle relativley large datasets. The problem here is we (and worse, our customers) have to buy an expensive HP/IBM/Sun machine to use it. Informix don't seem to support SCO and nothing has been said about a Windows NT version. We are conserned about cost to our customers, as well as the ease of selling a Windows NT based solution. My general impression is that Informix is very far behind the times when it comes to modern GUI development. They seem to have a lot of realy top notch people working deep inside Unix, but end user applications and GUI's isn't particularly promising. (Nobody, I meand realy nobody in the industry that I have seen for years, have such ugly examples of user interfaces as the once Informix uses to show off NewEra. At the user conference they even managed to tell us about 3D buttons as an important new feature.) If you look at employment oportunities on their web site however, they seem to want people with more experience (the best once seem to exist between Windows only programmers). Top level people at Informix also told me this at the user conference, so may be there is hope. > > We have made a prototype of our 4GL application in Delphi and Access. Our > conclusion is that Delphi is a super tool *but* it has one major feature > missing, namely the possibility to perform the same functionality as the > 4GL CONSTRUCT statement. I.e. it seems to us that you can not easily design > a form in which the user can fill-in-the-blanks and press "Search". We have written a set of prototype functions for Visual Basic that does this. It isn't all that difficult, and will easily give you options that 4GL construct is missing. (A*|B* beeing one example.) Obviously the tool should include it, but the people designing these things don't seem to have grasped its importance. > > Access is OK as long as the application is small, I should mention that there > are numerous problems with the various combinations of TCP-stacks and > ODBC drivers. We will not port our application to MS-Access. > > We are currently eagerly awaiting the OpenLink ODBC driver to see how it > compares with INFORMIX-CLI and SQL Retriever from VisionWare. Please report. This is very interesting. > > If Delphi had a component for QBE (Quer-By-Example) we would probably go for > it. But for the time being we want to test NewEra 2.0 as well. But what if you have to print 75.000 invoices or write a function that goes through 200.000 records doing updates/inserts on the database based on calculated values for each record. We have several cases where we know of no way to do this in SQL. We are also very reluctant to use stored procedures. The language is so weak, they can't print++++ Having 4GL code runing on the server isn't a solution we would like. We want one language if we can get it. Perhaps moving to Windows NT using Visual Basic 4.0 and out of process OLE "objects" running on the NT server is an option? This would require heavy testing for performance and several other issues that we are not prepared to do right now. In a year perhaps? May be Delphi on Windows NT (this autumn?) is an option? > > I'd be more than interested to share experiences with others who are in the > process of porting old I-4GL code to Windows. > > > Javier Arroyo * Vice President > > Automated Environments * Roseville, CA > > email 74734.162@compuserve.com > > fax 916-782-8557 > > phone 916-782-unix > > > Steinar Overbeck Cook > Balder Programvare AS Nils.Myklebust@ccmail.telemax.no NM-data, Dalsbergstien 7, N-0170 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company